A couple of recent events serve as a grizzly reminder that even the quite town of Fountain Hills is not immune to the ugliness in this world.

Last week, a man was arrested after opening fire on a number of cars along the Beeline highway. Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured, but that wasn’t from lack of trying on the part of the shooter.

When he was finally apprehended, he was found to be in possession of body armor and many more rounds of ammunition. He clearly had a plan, even if it was terrible in nature.

Shooting more than a dozen cars throughout the evening, I think we can count ourselves lucky that there were no casualties in that particular incident.

As I sit here writing this on Sunday afternoon, I have just wrapped up our initial coverage of the drive-by shooting here in the middle of town on Saturday. To my knowledge, that’s only the second of such incidents in our town’s history and, while the first drive-by from several years ago resulted in nothing more than property damage, a man was critically injured this time around.

The full details of the event are not available yet, but rescue services were able to get the victim medical attention quickly. My understanding is that the victim is in surgery as I write this, still a bit baffled that I’m not talking about something that happened somewhere else, miles away from my hometown.

I should probably make it clear that I’m not trying to make any particular point so much as trying to work through a series of events that still seems a bit surreal to me.

Hopefully, by the time this week’s newspaper hits stands, we’ll have a better understanding of both incidents. But I’m not sure that even knowing more of the “why” will make matters less worrisome.

But as we reported in this week’s edition of The Times, there’s still some good to outweigh the bad. A group of young men stopped to assist one of the victims of the Beeline shooting and MCSO worked into the evening to track down and capture the shooter.

As for this weekend’s victim, emergency response personnel moved quickly to get him the treatment he needed, something I’m sure none of them were expecting to have to manage on a Memorial Day weekend in Fountain Hills.

My thoughts are with the folks affected by these events, and my thanks go out to those who helped, and are still helping, bring some resolution.

There’s no easy answer here, folks. Is this a matter of gun control, mental health, drug use or just plain bad people doing bad things? Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above, none of which seems to have a clear-cut solution.

But nothing drives home the fact that something needs to be done quite like having this kind of tragedy rear its ugly head right in your own backyard.

I’m thankful the local authorities responded so quickly to both of these incidents. They did their jobs well and, honestly, I doubt anything can be done on a local level in terms of preventative measures.

On a national scale, though, we’ve clearly got some work to do.